1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to portable devices having headphones, and more particularly to state changes in the portable devices.
2. Description of Related Art
Many portable consumer devices utilize a headphone in order to provide private and personalized audio to a user. In a stereo embodiment, these headphones typically include a right earpiece and a left earpiece coupled to a right and left channel of audio, respectively. Alternatively, the right and left earpieces may share a single channel of audio.
Conventionally, state changes in a portable device, such as a MP3 player or cell phone, must be manually initiated by a user. For example, if the user needs to place the device into a pause mode from a play mode, the user, typically, will need to physically access the device and make a selection (e.g., push a pause button) to pause the device. This may be troublesome when, for example, the device is located in a place that is hard to reach (e.g., deep in a pocket), the user only has a single hand or no hands free (e.g., holding items in both hands), or the user cannot safely access the device (e.g., while driving a car).
In alternative embodiments, the user may need to find a remote of the device and make a selection on the remote in order to change the state. Disadvantageously, this embodiment requires the user to physically locate and operate on the remote device in order to enable state changes.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for automatically changing states of a device without having to the physically access the device.